Lowering Simon Fraser was the result of an invitation from Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in Vancouver to undertake an artist residency. My residency occurred in three phases over three years (2015-2018) with additional support from Creative New Zealand and Valand Academy. In early 2017, I made a formal proposal and presentation to the City of New Westminster Heritage Commission, Public Art Committee and General Council to make a permanent adjustment to a civic monument in the city that had, over the course of the twentieth century, been relocated three times and physically shortened. My title Lowering Simon Fraser simply described what had taken place: the monument has become smaller. However, I deliberately used “lowering” as a verb to imply an action occurring in the present, a continued effort not yet complete, intentionally raising associations of diminishment, humbling, downgrading and dishonouring. Lowering Simon Fraser also evolved on the cusp of coincidental events concerning colonial memorials elsewhere, including calls for the removal of Confederate monuments in the United States and national debate over Canadian monuments to John A. MacDonald. In New Westminster, a bronze statue of Judge Begbie (“the hanging judge”) outside the Law Courts became the focus of intense local debate. In contrast, the Native Son’s monument to Fraser has remained relatively free from scrutiny; its riverside presence and squat proportions go largely unnoticed, and public memory of the, largely white, settler organisation that funded it has long since faded. My proposal to further lower the monument was approved by the city but did not receive the required written support of Qayqayt First Nation in New Westminster. The process that followed revealed some of the structural complexities, ideological aspirations and practical uncertainties located in achieving such a request in the context of contemporary British Columbia. In addition, it has highlighted the vulnerabilities and problematics of working at distance to the place in which the project is located geographically and conceptually, and the ability to maintain institutional attention on a durational project. In 2018, I reoriented the project towards a publication project with a local illustrator. This was an active decision to weave together elements of the factual, the fictive and my proposal to council. This book concludes with an imagined disappearance of the monument, drowned by a rising Fraser River. I employed a method of dispersed presentation whereby a number of artistic components appeared simultaneously in different ‘public’ sites over the course of one week: the book (available for free in New Westminster); announcements in the local newspaper; a text work displayed on a large bridge crossing the Fraser River, a physical action on the Simon Fraser monument itself; and a public discussion hosted by the City of New Westminster on the evening of October 1st 2019. At the heart of this discussion were questions of civic memory persisting from settler narratives; the omission of First Nations oral histories and attempts at redress in Vancouver; contested claims within First Nations groups for legitimate connection and territory in New Westminster; and broader, but complex, questions concerning the removal, reinterpretation or adjustment of monuments in our midst.